TO CHECHNYA WITH LOVE is a brand new grassroots benefit compilation to support persecuted LGBT+ people in need of urgent aid who are encountering violence, torture and murder in Chechnya, Russia.

Originally planned as a standalone release, the response to the project has been so overwhelming that it will now be a multi-volume series of releases. Volume 1 of the series is out on 1st June 2017 and available to download from Bandcamp – all proceeds will go to the Russian LGBT Network whose work directly supports those suffering in Chechnya.

Featuring contributions from some of the finest underground artists from across the UK, US and Europe (plus one from Russia), the engaging tracklist ranges right across the musical spectrum, from folk and electronic to math-rock and doom.

This first volume has been gathered and assembled in only two weeks and includes tracks from the likes of Bent Knee, Vodun, Cleft, Asva, Remember Remember and William Ryan Fritch. Many of these tracks have never been released previously.

Amps For Equality founder Javier Wallis explains: “I didn’t really think about what I was getting into when I started the project – I just felt compelled to do it, and once the decision was made and I posted about it online, the response just snowballed within days, from the many musicians I know in the UK’s Northern music scenes and all the way into the U.S. and Europe.”

I was raised in a Catholic household, and I remember the feeling of growing up and discovering who you are cutting against that grain. Reading reports from Chechnya, I felt like it could have been me in that situation. “

In April 2017 Elena Milashina and Irina Gordienko of the Novaya Gazeta reported that a wave of anti-LGBT violence had begun to sweep through the deeply conservative Russian province of Chechnya, directed and encouraged by local government and including mass arrests, detainment in secret prisons, torture and murder. Hundreds have been detained and at least twenty six people have been killed, though it is extremely likely that extrajudicial 'honour' killings, encouraged by the state, have resulted in further unrecorded deaths.

Tanya Lokshina, the Russia program director at Human Rights Watch wrote in an official statement: “For several weeks now, a brutal campaign against LGBT people has been sweeping through Chechnya. Law enforcement and security agency officials under control of the ruthless head of the Chechen Republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, have rounded up dozens of men on suspicion of being gay, torturing and humiliating the victims.”

AMPS FOR EQUALITY is a non-profit organisation and collective of UK musicians working on collaborative, live music and compilation projects to support LGBT+ and gender equality globally. It was founded in 2017 by Javier Wallis of Wilderness Hymnal in response to the LGBT+ ‘purge’ in Chechnya, Russia.

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